God's Word

For a moment I'll take seriously the idea that there is a God, he is omnipotent (knows everything) and omniscient (able to do anything) and that he "loves the World" and mankind.   We are to believe that God first had only his chosen people (the Israelites), but later decided that all people should come under his umbrella. Why would such a God just give his rules, a bit at a time, to a group of prophets spread over several hundred years in one small part of the world, and then a bit more to Jesus, (and if you are Muslim, more again to Mohammed) – and allow all these people to use their own words? And some of these people wrote in Hebrew; Jesus spoke Aramaic, but apparently didn't write anything down; and the words of Mohammed were, generations later, written in Arabic. Wouldn't a God who loved the World and all the people give his rules to everyone, in their own languages? If one is to believe the Bible, God wrote the Ten Commandments and then put down his pen (chisel?) and left the job of writing the remainder to men. Why didn't he do the whole job himself? Why leave such an important job to unreliable and very fallible underlings? Consider how much killing and torturing has been done, by groups who believed themselves to be following God's will to other groups who believed the same thing, over the last couple of millennia. All this could have been avoided if God had written the holy books himself and made sure there was no ambiguity.   There are three versions of the Ten Commandments in the Bible, two of them are very similar, Exodus 20:2-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21, the third version, in Exodus 34:12-26, is radically different. Perhaps he didn't have the literary ability (after all he didn't do a good job of the Ten Commandments; see the box on the right), or the language ability, or the publishing/printing facilities? Consider how much better the world would be if all peoples had the advantage of a faultless holy book in their own language. And God could bring out new editions periodically as new moral questions come up; things like cloning and the birth control pill.